Have you ever wondered why you have to choose between your smartwatch and your luxury timepiece every other day? Turns out, you’re not the only one with this dilemma. Omega has a new timepiece that partially solves this challenge, and it is the Speedmaster Chronoscope.
This triple scale chronograph is a telemeter, a tachymeter and pulsometer in one, with a spiral inner dial track that extends the ability to measure things. It is overlapped by a conventional chronograph hours counter in a subdial at 3 o’clock and small seconds at 9 o’clock. The multi-function colimaçon (snail-shaped) track on the dial is typical of Omega chronographs from the 1940s.
A tachymeter scale, which measures how fast you’re moving based on how far you have travelled, is a function that normally appears on the bezel or periphery of the dial, where it can time up to one minute. Here, it starts on the bezel, as per convention, but continues inside where it measures smaller units less than 60 per hour on the dial.
On the outer periphery of the spiral scale is the telemeter, which is used to time how far away you are from an event you can see and hear—such as the difference between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, or seeing the flash of an artillery shell and hearing the explosion.
The track just in from the telemeter is the pulsometer, which measures heart rate, graduated for 30 pulsations. For example, if you start the chronograph and run it for thirty pulses and the chrono stops at 60 on the scale, your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute.
The movement performing all of these tricks is the co-axial calibre 9908, a hand-wound version of the automatic calibre 9900. It has a Master Chronometer rating from METAS (the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology), which means it has an accuracy rating of 0/+5 seconds per day maximum deviation. To improve the timepiece’s power reserve (it runs to 60 hours), Omega has included twin barrels with anti-wear DLC (diamond-like carbon) coating. The movement is decorated in arabesque (wavy) Geneva stripes, a first for Omega, that start from the balance wheel and fan out to the edge of the backplate.
In all, there are seven models of the Omega Speedmaster Chronoscope, all with 43mm cases. Six of these are in stainless steel, with a mixture of brushed and polished finishes on their surfaces, while the last one is in Omega’s exclusive bronze gold alloy, complete with leaf-shaped hands and Arabic numerals coated with the same bronze gold case alloy, as is the buckle on the leather strap. It is priced at $14,100.
The steel models come with a silvery dial with blued hands and numerals; a blue dial with rhodium-plated hands and numerals; or a “panda”-style dial that combines a silver main dial with contrasting black subdials and blackened hands. Each variation comes on either a leather strap, with micro-perforations revealing a red underside or a polished steel bracelet with a patented comfort release system. (They’ll set you back $8,300 on a strap and $8,650 on a bracelet.) All the steel timepieces use anodized aluminium for their tachymeter-scale bezel rings, which are a longtime hallmark of the Speedmaster collection.
Source: Robb Report